Temboo, Twilio and Nexmo: SMS and voice messages from your IoT device

In this post, I will provide an overview of how to use Twilio and Nexmo to send SMSs and voice messages directly from your device. I will use a Particle Photon but this also works from an Arduino, or a Raspberry Pi or basically any other system. The reason for this is that I will also use Temboo, an easy to use service that basically provides a uniform way to call a wide variety of APIs and even helps you with a code builder.

I will use the same basic sketch form earlier examples. This means there is a photoresistor which measures the amount of light but also a button that will trigger the calls to Temboo to send an SMS and a voice message with the current sensor value from the photoresistor.

Let’s get started shall we? You will first need accounts for all three services so go ahead and sign up. They all have free accounts to get started but remember they are all paying services. It’s up to you to decide how useful you find these services.

For Temboo, you will need to provide the account name, app key name and app key. Sadly, in the free Temboo tier, this key is only valid for a month and you will need to manually change it. I added these values as #defines in a header file called TembooAccount.h. Be sure to use #include “TembooAccount.h” in you .ino file. The contents of the TembooAccount.h:

In your .ino file, we’ll create two functions:

void runSendSMS(String body)

void runSendVoice(String body)

When you want to send an SMS or send a voice message, you call the appropriate function with the message you want to send or the text you want translated to speech.

The contents of the function is easy to write because you don’t have to. Temboo provides a code generator for you. When you are logged in, just go to https://temboo.com/library/ and select the Choreo you want to use. For the SMS, you select Twilio / SMSMessages / SendSMS. You will now be asked for parameters for the Choreo:

After providing all the inputs, you will find the code below and then you will pick and choose what you need. You can find an example for SMS and Voice in the following gist: https://gist.github.com/gbaeke/15596e3e2d185eb11720c965ab33e179. The voice Choreo uses Nexmo / Voice / TextToSpeech. Tip: Nexmo can also take input from your phone (like press ‘1’ to turn on sprinklers) and send them back to your device!

To actually fire off the SMS and voice message, we’ll do that when the button is pressed:

As you can see, Temboo and the APIs it exposes as Choreos makes it really easy to work with all sorts of APIs. I have only used Twilio and Nexmo here but there are many others. Again, these are all paying services and the lowest Temboo tier is quite pricey for home users. If you find it a bit too pricey, you can always use the Particle IFTTT integration to achieve similar results.